Another pro-MEK legislator has written something on The Hill‘s Congress blog. Republican Rep. Ted Poe of Texas rehearses the usual song and dance about why we should sympathize with the Mujahidin-e Khalq, and he relies heavily on Iraq’s treatment of the people at Camp Ashraf. One point that Poe makes that very much needs to be corrected is this:

On April 8, 36 unarmed residents were murdered by Iraqi soldiers who invaded the Camp out of acquiescence to Iranian pressure.

The Iraqi government did kill these people, and that was atrocious, but it is important to understand that the Iraqi government was only too happy to attack the camp because the current Iraqi government loathes the MEK almost as much as the vast majority of Iranians do, and they loathe them for much the same reason. Just as Iranians regard the MEK as traitors for siding with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi government despises them for having worked for Hussein as brutal enforcers against Iraqis. Ray Takeyh explained this in his Congressional testimony on Camp Ashraf and the MEK earlier this summer:

The MEK would go on to behave as Saddam’s Praetorian Guard, as they were employed by him to repress the Iraqi Shia uprising of 1991. Given the fact that the Shia community is having a leading role in the future of Iraq, such miscalculation has alienated the MEK from the rulers of Iraq. The Baghdad regime’s hostility to the MEK cannot be seen as a function of its ties with Tehran, but as a legacy of MEK’s alliance with Saddam.

This is the group that American and European advocates are trying to rehabilitate and remove from the FTO list. It is a group that has earned the hatred of the governments of both Iraq and Iran, and the vast majority of Iraqis and Iranians. If one wanted to invent a worse ally for opposing the Iranian government, it would be virtually impossible to come up with one worse than the MEK. It is appropriate to get as many people out of Camp Ashraf, not least since as many as 70% of the inhabitants are reportedly held there against their will, but as long as their cultish leaders bar them from accepting refugee status it is extremely difficult to get these people out of Iraq without sending them back to Iran.